"It's an absolute living nightmare," Janice O'Connor said. "They had just gotten some more people there and they cleared the dogs from one area and they were going to let us do a foot search. There were forty, fifty people there and we were just getting ready to start walking. I knew then it wasn't good."

Chris was at a tubing event Saturday that began at Croton Dam and was to end at the Thornapple access. People who had been floating with Chris told his mom that Chris' stepson got into a confrontation with others on the riverbank at one point during the trip, and Chris stepped in to break it up. Then everyone got back on their tubes and continued on.

"We don't know if maybe when the altercation took place -- everyone said Chris wasn’t hurt in it," said Janice O'Connor, adding that she saw a shaky, garbled cell phone video of the fight.

She said people had conflicting accounts about when and where Chris went missing.

"That was part of the frustration. They were getting so many different versions of the story and that’s part of what delayed some of the search," she said.

Her son was not a strong swimmer, but could probably stay afloat for "a bit." She will wait to see if autopsy results can provide more answers about how he died.

She and Chris' dad, Tim, drove from Port Huron Sunday when they heard their son went missing. As they traveled back home Monday evening, O'Connor laughed at what a "happy baby" Chris had been. He had a wife, Christina, and was a "fabulous father" to a 5-year-old girl.

"He treated her like a princess. Oh my goodness, she had him wrapped around her little finger," O'Connor said. "She'll be lost without him."

Chris was a computer technician at Paulstra Automotive. Twenty-five or 30 co-workers helped in the search Monday - a testament to how loved he was, O'Connor said.